All this is to say that shortly before he turned 40, Reed had established himself as one of the saddest burnouts of all time. In the absence of artistic and commercial success, his mercurial persona and self-destructive habits made him look less like a rock star and more like an ordinary asshole: someone who had gotten what a generation of musicians dreamed of and traded it for what millions of dumb, violent addicts couldn’t escape.
And then he dropped The Blue Mask. It sounded different from anything he had done before but was unmistakably him—the quote-unquote real Lou Reed everyone recognized but no one could duplicate, a sound that was at once new and a return to form. The first time I heard it, I assumed The Blue Mask was ironic; the second time, I began to suspect that it was the least ironic album of all time. It is strange, specific, and painfully honest, ugly in places and beautiful in others: in other words, a redemption story. Whatever Reed had lost over that last decade, artistically, he got it back.
What changed? For one thing, he dramatically reduced his consumption of drugs and alcohol, although as with many addicts who get clean under their own supervision, how close he got to zero BAC is not clear. He also married Sylvia Morales, a younger painter and poet whom he met at CBGB in 1977. Mostly leaving New York City—Reed kept his rent-stabilized apartment in the Village—the two lived together in Blairstown, New Jersey, in a house in the woods near a lake.
The first track of The Blue Mask, “My House,” is, at least on a literal level, about Reed’s belief that this home in Blairstown is not only “very beautiful at night” but also haunted by the spirit of his former college professor, the poet Delmore Schwartz. This idea is astonishingly self-centered, which is how you know Reed was getting sober. Taking stock, he sings that he’s got “a lucky life/My writing, my motorcycle, and my wife/And to top it all off, a spirit of pure poetry/Is living in this stone and wood house with me.” One can only imagine how thrilled Schwartz would be knowing that he was remembered as a figure of comparable importance to Reed’s motorcycle. But as with almost every track on this album, the real subject of “My House” is not the house or its appurtenances; it is Reed’s ongoing struggle to live productively amid the furnishings of his own mind.
These furnishings are old but unfamiliar, as though Reed had awakened from a blackout and was looking at them for the first time—which, in many respects, he was. The alternately healthful and agonizing experience of seeing himself clearly is the central theme of The Blue Mask, and it is reflected in the alternately beautiful and grotesque sound of the instrumentation. These arrangements are even more expressive than the words, if only because they convey feeling unconstrained by meaning or circumstance and therefore parallel Reed’s dislocating new sobriety. The singular sound of The Blue Mask provides a counterpoint to Reed’s lyrics, nudging them over the line from kind of dumb to definitely dumb and therefore great.
